


in the rain the world turns to silver

by ninemoons42



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Porn, Foreplay, Hand Jobs, Kissing and Feels, M/M, Masturbation, Porn with Feelings, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Rain, Recovered Memories, Unreliable Memories, mention of last rites, mention of skinny sickly Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 03:17:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2333297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Under cover of a rainstorm, Bucky and Steve exchange truths and memories, some of them painful. And then they have sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the rain the world turns to silver

**Author's Note:**

> I blame this one entirely on the typhoon that just swept through my city. 
> 
> The title for this one sort of comes from "On My Own" (Les Miserables).

He opens his eyes and the other side of the bed is empty, but he knows he’s not alone.

Voices nearby, murmuring.

“Soundproofing,” Bucky is whispering, “is it possible to tone down the soundproofing or something? Not completely – I just want to hear.”

“You wish to hear the rain, sir.” JARVIS’s smoothly modulated tones.

“If it’s possible.”

“It is.”

And Steve wakes up all the way, as soon as he hears that faint faraway torrent and the muffled forlorn whistling of the wind. 

He sits up, and he looks at the windows, and there’s a storm raging out there: Manhattan’s glass and steel canyons shivering under the sideways shattering rain.

If he concentrates, if he makes himself sit very still, he can almost imagine that the entire tower might be rocking very slightly from side to side, pushed this way and that by the relentless wind.

“Thank you,” says Bucky’s voice. It’s closer, now. Close enough that Steve can reach out and touch him, where he’s standing near the foot of the bed.

Steve manages to catch those softly gleaming fingers, lightning reflecting off neatly joined plates, and Bucky turns, focuses, all of his attention shifting so suddenly and so completely that Steve sighs and smiles. 

“Hi,” Bucky says, as he sits down. He’s wrapped in a blanket. His hair falls into his face. “Didn’t mean to wake you up.”

Steve shakes his head. Asks, instead, “You couldn’t sleep?”

“I was sleeping. And then I woke up.” Bucky sounds like he might be shuffling his feet. Steve very carefully doesn’t clutch his hand more tightly. That shuffling means movement, or the aborted thought of it, and he can’t let Bucky run, not again – but he can’t restrain Bucky, either. The last thing Steve wants is to make Bucky think of being confined again. Being imprisoned again. He’s not so very far away from that.

(Three weeks dragging on interminably into four until there’d finally been a response from Westchester, a response to a very urgent message. A sleek black jet and its two pilots. Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, back from fighting their own battles. Bucky’s hands in theirs, holding on tightly, as Charles gritted his teeth and dove into fragmented memories, almost constantly checking in for permission, for consent. 

(And afterwards, Erik’s gnarled hands soothing away some of the scratches and strain from the joints of Bucky’s left arm.

(That was six or seven weeks ago.)

Steve hesitates, knows the question’s close to being worn out, close to losing its intrinsic meaning, but he has to ask. He can’t not ask. But he tries to soften the blow of it. He leans over, resting his forehead against Bucky’s blanket-cushioned shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Bucky sighs, as Steve expected. An exhaled breath that expresses what words can’t or might not be able to completely encompass. “Maybe.”

Steve blinks. That’s new. That brings up other questions. He doesn’t ask, doesn’t try to pry. He grits his teeth around the words.

“I can hear how hard you’re thinking.” Is that the rough burr of suppressed laughter in Bucky’s voice? 

“I’m not going to ask you any questions you might not be up to answering,” Steve says. 

“Well how are you going to know if I’m up to answering them, if you don’t ask in the first place?”

Steve huffs. “If you know what I want to ask, you can get on with answering.”

“Sometimes it’s nice to be asked,” is Bucky’s response, and he _is_ laughing. Soft amused puffs of breath, warm against Steve’s hair. “And since you asked so nicely.”

A tug on the hem of his shirt. Steve looks up. Bucky meets his gaze for a moment, then looks away, out the windows. The storm’s getting stronger. Rain slashing and smashing against the glass. 

“Never really thought about the rain, then,” Bucky murmurs. “But sometimes I’d get angry, hearing all that pouring going on. Didn’t really think about _why_ the rain pissed me off. I wondered if I’d fucked up a mission or something. If I’d missed a target because they’d changed their plans.”

Bucky’s face is awash in waterlogged New York City neon. “After D. C., I holed up in a place where it rained twenty-two hours out of twenty-four, and I had to make myself listen to it because otherwise all I’d know was myself twisting inside-out, once I’d gotten away, once you’d blown the helicarriers to bits. Lost without the chair, without the wipes, without people telling me what to do and where to go.”

Steve winces, makes himself nod. 

“I heard voices, sometimes, in that rain. Someone who sounded a lot like me, whispering, over and over again. He kept saying, _Please please please._ And someone coughing. Someone shivering. Sick and wet and in pain.”

Bucky turns to him, then, with mutely pleading eyes, and this is something Steve can do, wants to do, is permitted to do. He opens his arms, and Bucky falls into them. Bucky holds on. “Steve?”

“Bucky.”

“I think those voices were you and me. When you were – skinny. You’d get sick whenever the weather turned. And – you’d fight, you’d eventually recover, but – there were close calls. A lot of them. Right?”

Steve shivers, and that must be as good as an answer, because Bucky makes a soft wounded sound and pushes him down into the blankets. Bucky curls in, mostly on top of him, and shakes.

Steve very carefully does not try to remember those days when it had been so much worse, when he felt like he’d been clinging on to life by the fingernails, weak and halfway to letting go with each passing minute.

“’S crazy,” Bucky mutters, after a moment. “All that, you and me, almost dying over and over again, and ice, wars, the whole world going after you, going after me – and we’re still here. How? No, don’t answer that, I know how. You and Dr Erskine. Me and – Dr Zola. Fucking doctors. And thanks to them we’re here. We’re here, aren’t we?”

Steve doesn’t answer him, not directly. He says, “Hang on,” and he rolls them over. He puts his hand behind Bucky’s head, cushioning and careful. He bears down with all of his weight, but carefully, and Bucky does the opposite of squirming away. Bucky’s grabbing at him, holding on as hard as he can, and Steve lets him.

“Steve,” Bucky says.

“Does this feel real to you?” Steve asks. “Do _we_ feel real?”

“We. You and me.” More quietly: “Yes.”

Steve listens. Storm outside, and Bucky’s breathing beneath. 

“There was one other thing,” Bucky says, eventually.

They’ve shifted, again, and now Steve’s lying on his side, and Bucky’s plastered against his back, and he _feels_ so solid and so present. Steve would pray for him to stay, if that were possible, just like when their positions had been reversed in Brooklyn all those years ago, because _please please please_ had been the tail-end to all of the prayers Bucky had ever said over him, the frantic refrain over the two or three times they’d actually called in a priest. Steve swallows, hard, past repeating memories of a final confession and the taste of Viaticum on his tongue and oil on his forehead.

He makes himself ask, “One other thing?”

He feels it when Bucky nods. “Different memory. Or something else I heard in that rain. Same words. _Please please please._ But – different context. Maybe the exact opposite.” Bucky moves, looms over Steve, and Steve looks up into the rain-shadows caught in Bucky’s eyes, the arc reflections of lightning. “Steve. We – we fucked, right? Back then? We’d do it when the noise of the rain would drown us out – ”

Steve’s not sure which one of them moves, after: does he lunge up from the pillows, or does Bucky crash into him? All he knows is that they’d been talking, that he’d been nodding, because as soon as Bucky started talking again he knew where the words would lead – and now there are no words, just blankets shifting and falling away as he kisses Bucky, as Bucky kisses him. Bucky’s hands on either side of his face, warm and yearning.

Steve arches up, his own hands moving blindly. He finds Bucky’s shoulders and then he pulls Bucky down, hands moving down Bucky’s sides, stopping at Bucky’s waist. 

Even they have to break away to breathe and Steve reluctantly opens his eyes – when had he closed them? Why had he? – to bright need and bright confusion in Bucky’s face.

“We did,” Steve tells him. “We hated walking through the rain, but – but we liked being home, even if the ceilings leaked sometimes. Or a lot, actually. We’d just move our blankets out of the way.” He remembers the feeling of wooden floors beneath his knees as he sucked Bucky’s cock – he remembers those same wooden floors holding him up as Bucky put him on his hands and knees and took him, so desperately careful, the two of them still fighting to muffle their voices even when the rain was all they could hear.

“Oh, god,” is Bucky’s response, and – _relief_. That’s relief on his face. A shaky little smile. “I – I was afraid it was just – wishful thinking. Or worse. A false memory. It’s real, you tell me it’s real – Steve – ”

He has to ask. “What do you want, Bucky? I can – we can – whatever you want, but you have to tell me, please – ”

“I – I want to, I want you – ” Bucky looks away, and something dark wings across his face. “I just don’t know how to make it good for you. I want to do that.”

Steve makes himself smile. “You always knew how to do that, pal,” he says. “You drove me crazy all the time. You knew what I liked even before I could think of it myself.”

A tentative smile in response.

Steve eases him back down; they’re on their sides again, and Steve makes sure Bucky can still see the windows, see the pouring rain, in case that might help him. “We can go slow, if you like, just – just to remember. Not hurrying. Okay?”

“Okay,” Bucky whispers, and he leans forward and initiates the kiss, and Steve smiles and holds him and kisses back. He makes encouraging sounds when Bucky licks at him, and he lets Bucky in, and the breathless fluttering in his chest is both familiar and so new.

He can’t help but take Bucky’s hand and put it on the back of his head – and he moans, and the rain drowns that moan out, when Bucky pulls at his hair, makes him tilt his head back. Sharp shivering shock of sensation: Bucky’s licking at his jaw, at his throat, and Steve hisses, helplessly, “Yes yes please.”

“Yeah,” Bucky whispers into the hollow between his collar bones, and he follows that up with another kiss.

Bucky’s like lightning as he moves, brief flashing burning – teeth and tongue and then his hands, pulling gently at the hems of Steve’s t-shirt – Steve breaks away and regrets every second they’re apart, and he says “Bucky” like he’d said “Please”, and his reward is a smile and a nip to his earlobe.

No rush, he’d said, and Bucky seems to have taken him completely at his word. Unhurried. The rain’s constant falling touch has nothing on the drag of Bucky’s fingertips, exploring, and Steve can only hold on to Bucky’s shoulders and fight off the urge to ask, to beg. Need slashes at his nerves and leaves him shaking.

Bucky lifts his mouth away from the juncture of Steve’s throat and shoulder, and Steve can feel the bruise rising, a bruise that he knows won’t last. It will be gone in a few hours. A vague memory of whispering into Bucky’s ear, one night on watch with the rest of the Howling Commandos exhausted and snoring like a field of hacksaws: Steve’d wanted to keep the bruises Bucky had left on him, the two of them shivering against each other, utterly reliant on the tree that Bucky had pressed Steve up against to keep standing at all.

He’s whispering that now, too, and Bucky lights up above him. The smile on Bucky’s face could almost, almost be that same devilish smile from that night, if perhaps lined around the edges – and Steve welcomes those lines. They mean Bucky’s here, somehow, despite ice and despite falling through broken glass and shattered steel. 

Bucky moves downwards and Steve arches up to meet him, to encourage him. Steve’s past the point of saying Bucky’s name, now. Fragments of words spilling uncontrollably from his lips, and from time to time Bucky captures those fragments in wild sweet kisses, but then Bucky goes back to mapping Steve’s body with his fingertips and his tongue and Steve stops breathing every single time. He’s lightheaded, and it’s because of Bucky. It’s so good he thinks he might break.

“I’d catch you,” Bucky is rasping, just above Steve’s navel, and Steve hadn’t even thought that he’d still be capable of talking. 

“Don’t stop,” Bucky says. “’S good, hearing you talk, feeling you react.” 

And Steve can’t help but react when Bucky pulls the track bottoms he’d gone to sleep in away: he says Bucky’s name, over and over. He cants his hips towards those gently seeking, gently possessive hands. Soft moans when Bucky takes his cock in hand. God, he can feel his own pulse as it beats insistently against Bucky’s fingers. It’s all he can do to scrabble at Bucky’s clothes, to formulate the question, or half of it: “Do you want to – ?”

Shadowed smile. “Mmm. Maybe in a few minutes. Let me look at you, first.”

“Oh god,” Steve whispers, and he shivers and lets his legs fall open.

He can feel the difference when Bucky touches him with his left hand, and then with his right: unyielding metal followed by soft flesh. It’s too much. It’s so good. He bites savagely at the inside of his own cheek, enough to nearly draw blood, enough to claw his way back from the inevitable precipice and the fall, and all the while Bucky’s still touching him – 

“Stop, stop,” Steve pleads, at last, with bright lightning sparking behind his tightly closed eyelids. “Going to, I can’t, I want you, _Bucky_ – ”

“And if I wanted you to come for me?” is Bucky’s question, steady and rough around the edges. One of his hands is still moving on Steve’s cock, slow and hard, sweet torment.

Steve shakes his head, frantic useless denial, and then he can’t hold back any more. He whispers, “Fuck, oh, _oh fuck Bucky_.”

That incandescent edge in his head. He goes over it, Bucky’s name still on his lips. 

He can hear Bucky saying his name.

“You,” Steve begins, and then his words fall away because Bucky is shifting, Bucky is straddling him, and Steve doesn’t know what Bucky’s got planned but he nods, whispers wordless encouragement. 

He watches, wide-eyed, as Bucky looms over him and takes himself in hand. In his metal hand. The other hand braced against the bed, over Steve’s head. 

“Steve,” Bucky gasps as he starts to stroke, as the first movements speed up and repeat, and Steve is helpless to do anything else other than to reach up and hold on to Bucky’s hips. His breath speeds up again, matching Bucky’s, and Bucky doesn’t last long, not like this, and Steve watches avidly as Bucky keens and comes, wet heat splattering his face and chest.

He can at least catch Bucky when he eventually slumps over; he can at least guide Bucky back down to the bed. They’re a mess, now, sweat and come and kiss-bruising, soft gasping breaths swallowed up in the continuing roar of the rain.

“Steve?” 

The question catches Steve just as he’s about to, reluctantly, drop off. He wants to stay awake, but he’s sex-drunk and Bucky’s holding his hand. He has to claw his way back to responding. He has to answer Bucky’s questions. “Hey, Bucky, yeah,” he slurs. “What – ”

Bucky’s next words are a jolt. “I didn’t think I could do that again.” A soft, mournful sound. “I wanted it to go on. I didn’t want it to end.”

“You – we – there’s always next time,” Steve offers.

“Yes,” Bucky says. “Yes. Next time. Steve. Will you fuck me?”

“Yes,” Steve repeats. “Anything you want.”

He lets out a breath he doesn’t know he’s holding when Bucky leans into him, turns toward him, trusting, and falls asleep.

Eventually the rain lets up, and the silence that it leaves behind is filled with the presence of Bucky, his breaths and his skin against Steve’s, and – Steve lets himself sleep, too.

**Author's Note:**

> I am also on [tumblr](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/).


End file.
